The Athenian experience may help us to sharpen several decisive questions of our time: In what form do the mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion that run through a group build a true society that is more than the sum of its disparate networks? Conversely, by what processes does a society come to tear itself apart, or even disintegrate? How do heterogeneous social arenas and temporalities coexist within it? Under what conditions should the fervor of exceptional situations be maintained without sinking into totalitarian unity? All these questions unfold with clarity in one quite singular moment of the history of Athens: the civil war of 404/3 BC.

This chapter takes as a starting point one of the great figures of the Athenian civil war: Archinus, a resistance fighter against the Thirty from the outset and the main architect of the reconciliation in 403. By a strange turn of events, Archinus endeavored to recast Athenian law and to mark the permanence of the community beyond the vicissitudes of the civil war. Archinus, a tireless promoter of a reunified city, managed to gather two groups around his project, which each presented symmetrical evolutions: on the one hand, all the democrats who, having fought against the Thirty, did not want to open the civic body to new entrants, even deserving ones; and on the other hand, all ‘those from the town’ who were ready to cooperate with the restored democracy, such as Rhinon, a fascinating political ‘weather vane’ who appears, in many respects, to have been Archinus’ alter ego in the oligarch camp. After violently opposing each other during the civil war, these men agreed to merge into a single chorus, dancing in step within a seemingly pacified city. However, this irenic vision must be put into perspective in view of the violent upheavals experienced during the reconciliation process. Far from being a foregone conclusion, reconciliation actually went hand in hand with the maintenance of a strong political conflict, as illustrated by an astonishing profusion of trials between 403 and 399, attested to both by numerous law court speeches and by extraordinary epigraphic sources (i.e. curses [katadesmoi] engraved on lead tablets and buried in the ground). These clashes clearly worked to the advantage of the ‘moderates’ on both sides, who succeeded, at the time, in winning before the Assembly and in the courts and, subsequently, in imposing their version of history in the city.

A speech by Isaeus allows us to observe in detail a family chorus caught up in the turmoil of the Athenian civil war. It is at its heart that the heroine of this chapter, Hegeso, lived for most of her life. “Hegeso (daughter) of Proxenus”: her name is engraved on a beautiful funerary monument located in the Kerameikos Cemetery. A woman alone, whose portrait is on display in a public space, without any male presence: It’s a rare enough occurrence that we may be tempted to think this stele is an exceptional document testifying to a particular form of recognition not of womankind, but of an individualized woman. However, this would be wrong. For the very name of Hegeso can only be established through interaction with the other funerary monuments nearby, and this tends to erase the singularity of her presence by confining her to the role of the model wife. Above all, Hegeso finds herself at the crossroads of a family feud between two branches of the family of Proxenus, her father, caught up in the events of 404/3. Far from constituting a zone of withdrawal and intimacy, families were rife with political conflicts. The memorial of Hegeso nevertheless exhibits the harmony of the family sphere in the form of two half-choruses singing in tune: the regulated game of exchanges from which marriage proceeds, as well as the regulated gender divisions within it. Celebrating the fixity and the permanence of family lineage, this portrayal masks, or staves off, political turbulence by presenting the oikos as existing in an unchanging temporal space: that of its cyclic reproduction from one generation to the next.

Around Nicomachus, the alleged son of a public slave, who became the collector and transcriber of the city’s laws, a group of men in the service of Athenian institutions takes shape. Radically distinct from that of the magistrates, their activity was well and truly outside the political field, as described in Plato’s Statesman. It brought together slaves and free men, whether they played the role of assistant to the archons or of undersecretaries to certain magistrates. Reading the prytany inscriptions suggests that, within it, the distinction between free men and slaves prevented the formation of a collective identity based on a specific skill and professional dignity. The chorus of bureaucrats that surrounds Nicomachus, in short, is only a mirage. Trapped by the city’s self-representation, such a reading would, however, be erroneous. It undoubtedly underestimates the existence of an administrative culture of which these men, whether they were free or slaves, could be the guardians, and about which our sources are admittedly tenuous. Above all, it ignores the opportunities public slaves were given to accede, if not during their lifetime, then possibly via the intermediary of descent, to the society of free men. Nicomachus, after all, was perhaps the son of a dēmosios, and, if this was the case, it allows us to suggest, on the one hand, that service to the city could lead some of these slaves to see their descendants acquire citizenship and, on the other hand, that citizenship could be acquired through the transmission of professional skills from father to son, which were put to service for the common good. Therefore, it is perhaps through the transmission, over several generations, of a skill used in the service of Athens that the chorus of the bureaucrats of the city came into being, which transcended the distinction between free men and slaves.

The sources mention many Athenians who settled abroad during the troubles to quietly go about their business, or remained in the city, secluded in their oikos, without joining either camp. To take an interest in these ‘nonaligned’ individuals is to give their place in history back to the many protagonists who resisted the all-encompassing logic of the stasis and the contradictory injunctions that it gave rise to: Choose your side, comrade! But not everything is political in the same way and with the same intensity, either today or in the past: Even in the midst of turmoil, politics does not invest all spheres of existence and all the different layers of society in equal measure. Indeed, orators readily stigmatized the Athenians expelled by the Thirty who, instead of rallying to the democrats in Piraeus, had preferred the comfort of exile; symmetrically, many Athenians who remained in the city tried to demonstrate that they had not participated in any way in the exactions of the oligarchy. Socrates represents in this respect a case that is both common and exceptional: common, in that he was far from being the only one not to take sides during the civil war; exceptional, in that he declared this neutrality loud and clear, even if it meant arousing suspicion on both sides. A final question remains: Did all these ‘neutral individuals’ form a chorus in their own right? What links can be established between people who have remained outside the field of political confrontation – strangers to the ‘bond of division,’ to paraphrase Nicole Loraux? To put it another way: Is it possible to ‘make community’ out of abstention, even if it is an active choice?

Freeze frame: It’s Boedromion 12, 403. With his troops, Thrasybulus is marching up the Acropolis to make a sacrifice to Athena, after several month of exile. At first sight, we can only distinguish men: On one side stand the people of the town, frightened spectators of this intimidating procession; on the other, the victorious democrats – citizens, foreigners, slaves and freedmen – who are already preparing to forgive. As the Athenian civil war comes to an end, women appear absent, as if erased from the picture. But their presence can be sensed in the background, not only among the anonymous crowd who has come to watch, but also on the Acropolis itself. In a majestic role, the priestess of Athena Polias was necessarily present at Thrasybulus’ side, since she was to help him accomplish his sacrifice in the honor of the goddess. In all likelihood, the priestess of Athena played a central role in this ritual sequence, embodying the very specific participation of Athenian women in the resolution of the conflict. Her name – Lysimache – is known to us thanks to an extraordinary piece of evidence: After her death a few decades later, the priestess was commemorated with a bronze statue erected on the Acropolis, the work of a famous sculptor. But how did he manage to flesh out this fleeting and evanescent figure? Erased from history as written by men, she was nevertheless a central figure of the community; it is only necessary to take the trouble to read the ancient sources between the lines, being as attentive to what they express as to what they conceal. By means of some inscriptions and, especially, thanks to a play by Aristophanes performed in 411, it is possible to give back to Lysimache her full human dimension and to restore her singular mode of action within the city that went against the clichéd view of Athenian women as passive and legally in the minority. Better still, if we listen carefully, we can give voice to all those who surrounded her – not only the women directly involved in the cult of Athena, but more widely all Athenian women, including the foreigners to whom the priestess served as a mouthpiece in these ‘dark times.’

From the siege of Phyle, during the winter of 404, until the ascent of the Acropolis in the fall of the following year, several fighting communities had succeeded one another under Thrasybulus’ direction, reconstituting little by little, as if in ripples, the whole of the Athenian community. The city’s mantle – to refer to the Platonic image again – was, however, far from being unified and homogeneous at the end of the civil war. Torn and patched back together, its seams were visible, and the political life of the initial years of the fourth century made them periodically reappear. The memory of these events reflected these struggles: In the aftermath of the civil war, various accounts coexisted and contradicted each other, before being replaced, during the fourth century, by a univocal civic account. There is every reason to believe that Thrasybulus tried, in the aftermath of the democratic restoration in 403, to put the memory of his epic journey on public display. However, just as he did not succeed in imposing himself durably in public life after 403. Thrasybulus lost the battle of history and memory by failing to impose his own account of the events in Athens – and this is most certainly what ultimately explains why he got left out of ancient sources.